Build 2016 Themes

02 April 2016

The Microsoft 2016 Build Conference has come to an end. It was a very fun 3 days. From HoloLens’s to Roslyn to Xamarin there was nerdy goodness everywhere. When reflecting on the events it occurred to me that there were several reoccurring themes.

Microsoft Everywhere

With the purchase of Xamarin they have can create mobiles apps for almost any device

Docker was heavily demoed

In one of the coolest live demoes I have ever seen they took a Docker container with ASP.Net core and pushed it to Docker Cloud, AWS, Marathon and VSTS live.

Red Hat was represented and even presented

Core/Roslyn

Almost every single project they talked about at either has or will be moving to Core

ASP.Net now has its own core implementation

The Roslyn compiler is straight up drool worthy

Git

They are completely baking Git into Studio

It sounds like a large percentage of Microsoft teams are already using Git

It was rear to sit through a presentation without the presenter going out to GitHub

NuGet

NuGet is getting fully baked into studio By fully baked I mean studio will actually go out to your NuGet repositories to find missing references and add them to your project.

I cannot think of one code demo that did not use NuGet

Config Files Are Going Away/Rise of JSON

ASP.net core doesn’t use them; it uses JSON instead

NuGet in studio is switching over to JSON

A lot of the VSTS configurations are JSON based

Closing Thoughts

At first blush it may seem as though Microsoft is going a little soft. I think what we are seeing isn’t a softer gentler Microsoft, but one that has learned from some of its mistakes. They have tried to compete with Apple and Linux by making their own closed devices like the Windows phone. To say the least, it has not worked out for them. Even with all of their resources without buy in from the larger tech community they become irrelevant.